Enterprise software systems are typically sophisticated, large-scale systems that support many, e.g., hundreds or thousands, of concurrent users. Examples of enterprise software systems include financial planning systems, budget planning systems, order management systems, inventory management systems, sales force management systems, business intelligence tools, enterprise reporting tools, project and resource management systems and other enterprise software systems.
In many situations, an enterprise may maintain multiple enterprise software systems. The enterprise software systems typically create and maintain separate multidimensional databases to collect and manage information to support the business processes. Each of the enterprise software systems is “current” from the perspective of their respective users. An enterprise often desires to share data between the different enterprise software systems. As one example, the user may wish to move multi-dimensional data from a financial planning system to a reporting system.
One conventional technique for moving the multidimensional data is to export the multidimensional data from one enterprise software system to the second enterprise software system. During this process, it is often required to “freeze” or “lock down” the first entire enterprise software system in order to export consistent data. As one example, some software systems must be brought offline before any export can be initiated to prevent any updates or data changes during the export process. During this process, users of the first enterprise software system are prevented from accessing and utilizing the software system.
Moreover, the multidimensional data often must be exported to an offline “staging area” of the second enterprise planning system. The staging area acts a temporary holding area while the multidimensional data can be processed and merged into the second enterprise planning system. As a result, conventional techniques for sharing data between enterprise software systems are often cumbersome and time-consuming.